Modern medicine sometimes employs surgical procedures (“surgery”), e.g., to remove, repair, or insert various organs, tissues, bone, or other “entities.” These entities may be original, replacement (e.g., from a donor), or artificial; and life forms (e.g., humans, animals, or other creatures) may employ such entities in both routine and extraordinary efforts.
Highly educated and skilled professionals (“surgeons”) generally perform surgery. Surgeons are accustomed to using several senses, including sight, hearing, touch, and sometimes even smell to guide their actions while in an operating room. Surgeons rarely rely on only one sense and more often augment a primary sense with other information or senses. Surgeons may also employ their senses to complement each other. As an example, touch can be used when manipulating a surgical tool (“instrument” or simply “tool”) without a clear line of sight, e.g., to distinguish between various organs, bone, tissue, fluids, etc., when the instrument cannot be seen while it is inserted in a patient undergoing the surgery.
In some cases, surgeons may perform procedures remotely, such as by using remotely guided robotic surgical tools. In such cases, the surgeons may not be able to rely on all of the senses that they are accustomed to using when directly operating on a patient.
Surgeons sometimes mistakenly damage an entity unrelated to the surgery. As examples, the surgeon may mistakenly puncture a lung during heart surgery; damage a muscle during ligament surgery; etc. These mistakes can occur, for example, because of incorrect use of the surgical tools, unreliability of commonly used senses, inability to accurately position the surgical tools, etc.